| A Less Polite Response To Strachan Authored by Aaron Bronsteter - August 28, 2006 - 2:50 pm
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Most of RealGM.com’s visitors live outside of the Toronto sports bubble, so for those unfamiliar with the sports climate in Hogtown, the city is, simply put, a hockey city. When the Raptors and Maple Leafs were in the playoffs at the same time, there were likely as many Leafs flags at the Raptors game as there were Raptors flags. Leafs fans are among the most passionate in all of sports and fill up the Air Canada Centre year in and year out in support of their home team.
In a recent Toronto Sun article, one of the country’s most prized hockey columnists, Al Strachan, wrote a rant about how selling the Toronto Raptors will help Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE) fulfill their primary initiative of the Maple Leafs being the number one franchise in the NHL. Strachan’s argument was an interesting one to say the least, but is remarkably flawed in both premise and principle.
To begin, I’d like to thank Steve Buffery, also of the Toronto Sun, for standing up to Strachan in his rebuttal column. It is nice to see that my Raptors fan brethren and I are being represented by someone who does not suffer from a severe case of tunnel vision.
From the outset of Strachan’s column, one can tell that this hockey columnist’s view of the Toronto Raptors is as narrow as Hank Hill’s urethra. Strachan accuses the team of spending more money on “defunct coaches and acquisitions who never played a minute” than the Leafs have ever paid a player in their history. Such hyperbole is both erroneous and silly. I cannot think of a single Raptor who has not played a minute of NBA basketball and has earned a guaranteed contract worth more than that of the average hockey player. Strachan is referring to the acquisition of Alonzo Mourning – a trade holdout that lame duck general manager Rob Babcock knew would be an issue. Mourning’s situation was an isolated incident that was signed off upon by the very MLSE management that Strachan is protesting to. Additionally, the Raptors have always been notoriously cheap when hiring coaches, with the exception of the NBA’s all-time wins record-holder Lenny Wilkens and farm out first-time coaches like Darrell Walker, Butch Carter, Brendan Malone, Kevin O’Neill and Sam Mitchell; all of whom earned salaries that ranked among the lowest paid coaches in the NBA.
Strachan then waxes poetic about Jalen Rose earning $12 million during the NHL lockout season and about how nobody spoke out about it. Could that be because Rose played all but one game, lead the team in scoring with 18.5 points-per-game and was second in assists during a year where Vince Carter had been traded for peanuts? Not to mention that Rose had proven that his reputation as a locker room cancer had been superseded by his work ethic, charity work and leadership. How Strachan can even bring this up when the Raptors do not currently have a single active player with a bad contract on the books and the ink is still drying on Pavel Kubina’s newly signed $20 million deal is beyond comprehension.
Further, our beloved hockey columnist attacks the team’s attendance record, saying that the building is usually half empty, despite tickets being given away with pizza. First off Mr. Strachan, the Raptors, despite having the fourth-worst record in the NBA this past season, averaged sales of only 2500 seats less than the mighty Maple Leafs. Not to mention that the Raptors give away pizza to ticket holders when the team scores 100 points, not vice-versa and with the team averaging 101.4 points-per-game this season, that was certainly a nice treat for the team’s 17,000 plus loyal fans on an average night, so before you throw down the gloves on the Raptors, do a little bit of research.
I’d also like to apologize to you, Mr. Strachan, for the insane amount of coverage that basketball receives in this city. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time hockey was mentioned on radio or television. Unlike the rest of the country, you complain that we have to suffer through the slings and arrows of basketball coverage on radio, which, on a good day, ranges from one to two hours per day, aside from Wednesday’s exceptional Hoops show on the FAN 590 and live Raptors coverage. Also, I’m not sure if Paul Jones, Eric Smith, Sherman Hamilton and Leo Rautins will appreciate you calling them American hosts, although Chuck Swirsky and Jack Armstrong, two of our city’s finest are Americans who have been covering the game for years and are highly respected for their incredible work ethic in their field.
You then proceed to insult the fans of the formerly Vancouver Grizzlies who had their team robbed from them prematurely by a greedy owner who refused to give the city a chance. Who could blame the city for the attendance drop? The team’s best player was the unexciting Shareef Abdur-Rahim who is now a bench player in Sacramento and the most games the team had ever won in a season was 23. Yet the team’s attendance record still averaged 2,000 more fans per night than the 2002-2003 Cleveland Cavaliers, the year before the team drafted LeBron James. The Cavaliers are now top five in league attendance, which proves that the Grizzlies simply needed someone worth watching to show up for. It’s not like the team is doing much better in Memphis, where they placed in the league’s bottom five for attendance last season.
Strachan also proceeds to say it would be wrong infer that the Raptors will ever make the playoffs. I’m hoping that this is, again, silly hyperbole, since most people know that the team made the playoffs for three straight seasons during the Vince Carter era. Speaking of which, it may be helpful for me to inform Mr. Strachan that the Raptors had a higher attendance record average than the Maple Leafs during two of the three seasons that the Raptors were in the playoffs, which were, coincidentally, also years that the Leafs made the playoffs.
Speaking of the playoffs, it doesn’t seem that the Leafs have been able to vanquish the identity of being anything more than just a playoff team. The last time that the Leafs won the Stanley Cup or were in the NHL Finals will be 40 years ago this coming season. So by my count, that gives the Raptors about 30 more years to make the NBA Finals before your article will have even a smidge of relevance. It sure has been a long time since the Leafs have done anything but disappoint their legion of rabid fans. Perhaps if the front office would stop dumping young guys like Steve Sullivan and trading youth like Alyn Mccauley for aged veterans who almost guarantee the team a second round exit, the Leafs could be a contender by now. But alas, the fans are too impatient to watch the rebuilding process unfold, demand results and are spoon-fed a disappointing early playoff exit year-after-year – a shame, really.
The other shame is that the Leafs barely did anything in the offseason to improve the team. They added an unproven goalie and some roleplayers, but nothing that will help the Leafs’ soon-to-be 36 year old soft Swedish superstar Mats Sundin, who will make a whopping $7.5 million this season, take the team beyond the first or second round of the playoffs. The Toronto Maple Leafs’ record over the last thirty years depicts a team that has gone so stagnant that if it were a cool beverage, the city’s fans would surely be stricken with malaria.
Meanwhile, the Raptors have hired one of the league's most cunning, young general managers in Bryan Colangelo who has singlehandedly put his signature on the team this past offseason. Colangelo scored the top overall pick and added some international flavor by adding Andrea Bargnani in the draft and two valuable Euroleague players in Jorge Garbajosa and Anthony Parker. Not to mention that Colangelo has addressed the Raptors always-murky point guard situation by adding perhaps the team's first legitimate pass-first threat in T.J. Ford, who won the Wooden Award after his sophomore year in college. With these acquisitions and a payroll free of inflated contracts, the Raptors future is looking exceptionally bright.
Another accusation thrown at the Raptors in a last-ditch effort for credibility from a Canadian basketball readership is that the team detracts from the country’s economy because basketball players tend to live in the U.S. Strachan also claims that the U.S. “is full of self-centred idiots with money”. Do I taste a smidge of bitterness towards the country that bought out the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques and removed them from their disloyal fans that successfully let two more Canadian teams slip from our country’s grasp? Strachan thanks them in his column for taking the Grizzlies out of Vancouver, why no kudos to Jets and Nords fans who ignored their teams to the point that they went somewhere else.
Before I wrap up, let it be known that I acknowledge hockey as Canada’s most popular sport. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it; we live in a country where our national and cultural identities are defined by the popularity of hockey. It’s simply a shame that the last time a Canadian team won the cherished Stanley Cup was 13 years ago and meanwhile, Americans would rather watch the World Series of Poker on ESPN, while hockey decays on OLN. It’s alright to be bitter while the tradition of hockey continues to suffer and basketball thrives as a truly global sport with a talent pool that is slowly catching up to North America’s. But I beg of you Mr. Strachan, do not take your bitterness out on Canadian basketball fans, besides, I need not remind you what the term “puckhead” rhymes with.
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